I Once Knew A Girl
by Foul Ole Ron
Summary: A women gazes out the window of a train, seeing nothing. Leaves fall on the forgotten grave of a boy she once loved, and a man lies watchful in his cell.Waiting for something to happen...


_DISCLAIMER_: I do not own the characters of the honourable J.K Rowling

**I Once Knew A Girl**

_By Foul Ole Ron_

A tyrant sits hunched over his books, contemplating murder. A women gazes out the window of a train, seeing nothing. Leaves fall on the forgotten grave of a boy she once loved, and a man lies watchful in his cell.

The man is seemingly awake, stretched out on his stomach on a floor sparsely covered in dirty straw and mildew. Cold moonlight trickles in from a grid somewhere above him, illuminating the grimy skin on the man's right shoulder blade. The man is completely still, so still that a passing stranger might think him dead if not for the occasional blink of his staring eyes behind his glasses. Sharp spikes of damp straw prick into his cheek, and metal bars press into him on one side, though he pays them no heed. For his face is turned to the left, looking through dirt-caked mouldy lenses into the cell beside him in which he dimly remembers there was once another person. He does not know what her name was, but he does know that she was there, and that he watched her slow demise. Sometimes he can still see her, now curled in a corner, now kicking the walls in silent fury. But never uttering a sound. The man lies pushed up against this woman's cell, calmly waiting for something to happen, safe in the knowledge that nothing ever will.

The man barely notices as night swiftly gives way to the dawn, all he sees in his line of vision is stark bars and shadowy black figures that drift eternally through the dank corridors of the world outside his own. He used to feel them clamouring at his mind, but it seems they have taken all they can possibly take, for he is no longer affected. Not that he can recall in any detail the times when he _was _affected. He does, however, have strange dream-like memories of a great pain in his chest, something that caused him to struggle and thrash and clutch his head. That made him cry continually for days on end, and beg for mercy, only to be met by the ghostly silence of fear itself.

But now the man is strangely peaceful. His mind is empty of all things that once mattered to him, and his world is mostly a void, at times filled with nothing but strange noises from elsewhere, from places that he has never been and therefore do not exist. They do not instil fear into his heart, if indeed he has one.

The man does not move about much anymore. He mostly stays in his horizontal position, pressed close to the side of his cage on the floor. He breaths in stale straw and he thinks of nothing at all. He only moves so he can eat, though he is unsure as to why he must, and so that he can go to the toilet. There is a bucket by the door to the cell for this process. He has a vague feeling that he was once terribly embarrassed by this bucket, but now it seems only natural. Part of life in this darkened, timeless room. When the man does think, he wonders idly if there is another place beyond the bars, and if so, if it is possible for him to be there. He knows that the black figures who bring him food at intervals go somewhere, but he suspects that they are simply attending to other people like him, like the woman who used to live next to him. He remembers that woman with a special fondness, perhaps simply because she was a variation on his normal day. She had long, wavy, corn-coloured hair, and a pinched, rather ugly face, he thinks. He particularly liked to look at her face. It had a long, fierce nose and very bushy eyebrows. The eyes, too, were interesting, the man had noted in the long hours of studying her anguished countenance. They were black, and so deep set that if you stared at them long enough you felt as if you were falling into them, to be lost forever in their inky depths. The man had enjoyed this sensation, and had even felt a slight anticipation for the moment when the women would look his way. It is of course unusual for the man to feel anything at all, so perhaps that is why he remembers her absence even though she has been gone for so long.

For it has been a long time since the woman was there. Of that he is sure. He has little concept of time passing, of course, but he knows intuitively that it has been a great span of living since he last looked into the fathomless eyes of the blond woman, even if he cannot remember how to measure it. There are markings on the wall behind the man's foot, four vertical strokes dashed by one diagonally down, and then three more beside that. They are carved into the stone forever, and when the man chances to look at them, which is not often these days, he has a strange feeling that they should have some sort of significance for him, though he can't for the life of him think what it is. Sometimes, on his more active days, when he uses the bucket by the door, the man kneels beside the markings and gently traces them with an emaciated finger. His pinched face looks upward towards the light coming from the grill above and he shivers a little. Then he lies back down in his position by the woman's cell. He shies away from wondering. He has a feeling it will bring him pain.

The train slows and rattles to a stop, pulling in at the dreadful station. The woman, whose vacant gaze has not altered at all throughout the entire journey, brushes a hand through her hair. Once her hair had been thick, lustrous brown, and wayward. Now it is knotted and lank, the frizz that had once so dominated its personality gone forever. It hangs from her head in greasy, grey streaked rat tails; she has not brushed it in weeks. Calmly, she waits for instruction, and sighs. Rain comes down in sheets outside, and the sound of the water on the roof of the train is horrendous. The woman hardly notices this, nor the desolate station outside which is illuminated every so often by lightening strikes. She has retreated inside her head, wondering bemusedly how she could possibly have ended up here, at the end of everything. She feels a tiny burning flame inside at the injustice of it all, though this is nothing to what she would have felt twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, she could not have born it. But she has grown hardened to her turmoil. Hardened to the tragedy that has shaped her life, and the lives of so many others.

There is a click as the door to the woman's barred compartment slides open, and the woman feels the old fear, burning ever so slightly, in her chest. But she is greater than her fear, for she tries to laugh in the face of her horrific guard. Her bones feel weak and her mind feels dim. She hears voices in her head of past friends, old and young, alive and dead. But still she stands defiant as bony fingers fix upon her elbows and draw her from the train. Icy breath sends shivers down her spine and tears down her cheeks, but still she does not break down. Rain beats down on the pair of them: the woman and her monstrous guard, but neither of them are bowed by the enormous pressure.

The station is a coastal one, and the woman stares unseeingly at the broiling ocean below her, and the blackened ship above her. Her ghostly, black-robed guardian ushers her onto a massive ramp. The woman boards the vessel and begins what will surely be the last voyage she will ever make. She does not remember much of her sea-journey, for she sinks deep within herself, and wonders briefly why she does not simply throw herself over the side. It would be better than any fate she will suffer upon reaching the island prison which sends its inmates mad within months. The problem is, there is one thing the woman must know before she dies. So she makes the decision to live through the tumultuous ride through the night and arrives on the banks of a dead land soon after dawn. She is met by a band of black-cloaked apparitions, who seemed to shake with morbid excitement as they grope at her soul with their minds and fill her nostrils with the smell of rotting flesh. The woman hangs her head in despair and attempts to hold on to the few good memories she has. This is hard for her fear-swamped brain, as it seems that it has been a lifetime since she last felt joy. Cold hands grip her arms and the sound of deep, rattling breaths invades her brain. She arches her back and closes her eyes. Faces float across her mind's eye, babbling voices vie for her attention…

_"There's only one way to do it, you know," remarks a cheerful voice, "Don't tell me you can tame a hippogriff without a good hunk of old Toby's best steak…"_

_"Calm down, my dear," says a deep, pleasant voice, "I'm sure-"_

_"Hey! You've got my chicken! She's taken my chicken! Thief! My chi-"_

_"Slut!__ You're lucky my master doesn't-"_

_"Seize her! Don't let her get away!"_

_"Crucio!"_

_"CRUCIO!"_

The woman shakes her head violently and opens her eyes. The cowled figures still have her tightly in their grasp, and tendrils of their being seem to seep into her very bones. She hears herself cry out, but she can't tell what she's saying.

The woman screams as she is thrust into a cage-like room, a cell. She hits her head on the slimy wall and tiny stars erupt across her vision. Yet she welcomes the pain, because it relieves the fearful pressure of the guardians. If they could laugh, she is sure they would, but as it is they shuffle excitedly outside the bars. She clutches her head and turns away. It is all that she could have expected. She wonders how long it will be until she goes mad. Because she will go mad, eventually. She is not innocent, and she has no hope to cling to like another person she had once known, who had also lavished behind these very bars. The thought of him causes a deluge of other memories to resurface, and she presses her fingers into her ears until they bleed.

Finally, the pressure eases somewhat. The greedy phantoms outside have gone about their business. The woman finds she can think more clearly, and glances around her new home, her eyes coming to rest on a solitary figure in the cell next to hers; a man lying so close to the bars that separate him from her that they dig into his pale, grubby skin. From a corner opposite him, she cannot make out much in the dim grey light, but she can see that he is naked but for a filthy cloth rapped sketchily around his emaciated form. Absently, almost indifferently, she wonders if his stillness indicates death. She gazes at him for a little over an hour, taking in his long, matted black hair and greasy, stringy beard. She notices that a pair of thin-rimmed, dirty spectacles are perched lopsidedly on the end of his nose. Curious despite herself, she heaves herself to her feet and moves silently closer. To her surprise, the man's eyes are wide open and staring straight at her; he is very much alive. They are green, emerald green, and the woman drops involuntarily to her knees, covering her mouth, as she sees a flash of recognition stir deep within them…

A jolt sears violently through the man's body, starting from somewhere around his stomach region. He feels his mouth open slightly as he stares up at the woman kneeling beside him. She has covered her mouth with her hand and is gazing down at him in horror. Abruptly, a vision forces itself into his mind…

"_You have_ _to listen to me! Snape is going to kick you out of potions if you're not careful! You're just not putting enough work in-"_

_"Snape can go and shove it! I'm working as hard as I can!" the words of another pour angrily out of the man's mouth, and he feels himself glare at the girl standing before him. She is red-cheeked and anxious as she stares beseechingly up at him. The man's vision self sits down on a couch behind him, his head in his hands, sighing,_

_"I'm sorry, it's been a long week. Did you do that essay from McGonagall?"_

_"Yes, but you're not looking at it…"_

The memory, or dream, or whatever it was, fades quickly from the man's head, and he is left staring in the dark, confused. He blinks as the woman in the next cell begins to cry quietly. He has an odd urge to comfort her – she looks utterly wretched. She is dressed in an ill-fitted, sack-like set of robes, and her hollow face is cruelly wrinkled and lined with worry. Her brown eyes swell with tears that tumble down her pinched cheeks and onto the callused hands clasped before her. He is reminded forcibly of the previous occupant of the cell, and feels unusual remorse as he acknowledges that she will probably go the same way as her predecessor. The man contemplates reaching out to touch her hands, which are inches away from his own face, but he does not. He is still feeling uncomfortable due to his strange memory, and the look in the woman's eyes when she saw his face. For the first time in many hours, he turns his head away from the woman's cell and stares instead at the bucket by the entrance to his own. He tries to think of nothing, but for once it doesn't work. For the second time, long suppressed memories swamp him…

_He is standing in a room full a light__, his feet shoulder width apart. He young. Terribly young, he knows. He is very angry. An old man sits by the fire, staring fixedly into the mug he holds in his lap. The man's fury seems to be directed solely at this poor, decrepit, wretched old man who looks to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. _

"_You can't be serious," snarls the man's vision-self, his boy-self. The old man looks up. Suddenly he is not so feeble, suddenly he is emanating power. Suddenly, the old man's eyes are boring into the boy, piercing his very soul._

_"I assure you, I am deadly serious," he says, his voice low and sad,_

_"I _won't_," cries to boy, "I've had enough, I just won't…you can't make me!" he feels as if his heart is bursting through his chest, he is saturated with emotion. The old man smiles grimly,_

_"You don't have a choice," he says, "It's not up to you. You have a responsibility-"_

_"I do not! Haven't I done enough? Why me-"_

_"You know exactly why," says the old man, "Vent your anger if you must. It is probably a good thing." The boy stares at him, every particle of his being screaming at him to rant, to rage, to prove this man wrong. He opens his mouth, and feels despairing calm wash over him. He lets out a weary sigh. Looking into the tranquil face of the wise old man, who he knows a friend, he perceives that he has already lost the battle. He slumps dejectedly into a chair; there is no point in any more protest._

_"So," he says, "What do I have to do?"_

…the man in the prison cell snaps violently back into himself, his mind a torrent of confusion and emotions that he cannot place. Already he can feel the familiar tug of shadows at his mind. _No, _his mind screams, _Not__ anymore_. He pushes all the images in his head away as quickly as he can, for he knows with a terrible certainty that the phantoms behind the bars will sense them in his brain and hasten to gorge on his spirit again. He knows he could not bear it. A shudder passes through his body and he shuts his eyes, blocking out the relentless sobbing of the person beside him, and plunging himself into stillness.

The brown-haired woman sobs until she can sob no more. Until her breath comes out in hiccupping gasps. Until her bloodshot eyes are red rimmed and sore. Until the jet of despairing anger that rages through her body has dulled to a slow ache. Until she is rational enough to wonder at the depth of her own feeling, even after all these years. Exhausted, she turns back to the man in the next cell. He is motionless, his eyes gently shut as if in sleep, his long, bony fingers curled loosely around the bars of his cell. Awkwardly, she crawls over the filthy straw, and lying down, brings her face level with his. She wants to wipe away the grime from his starved visage, wants to cut away the ugly, straggling mess that his beard. She wants to comfort him, though what possible comfort she could offer in a hell such as this she does not know. She lets out a small whimper, and reaches out her hand. She pulls it quickly back as his eyes snap open, bright green, and unsettlingly calm. There is no flash of recognition this time. The man blinks, and the woman remembers…

_The woman is in a cosy, circular room…there is a cheerful fire crackling merrily before her. Her bare feet are stretched before her, pleasantly warmed by the flames. The clock above the hearth tells her it is nearing __midnight__. No one is about, she appears to be waiting for something_._ She looks down at her hands – they are soft and smooth. She has an anxious, excited feeling inside. Behind her there is a noisy thud followed by a soft grunt and an amused snort,_

_"You're standing on my foot,"_

_"Well, it's your fault we had to rush, mate,"_

_"How was I to know Snape'd be roaming around-"_

_"Um, let's think…the Marauder's map?"_

_"_You_ were carrying the map!"_

_"Oh, yeah..."_

_The woman's girl-self turns around, smiling worriedly, and two boys appear from beneath a silvery invisibility cloak, there arms laden with books. She raises her eyebrows questioningly._

_"__Mission__ accomplished," says the red-haired boy, wiping his sweaty brow and delivering a mock salute. The girl rolls her eyes and hurries toward them, and begins to relieve them of their burdens. She skims over the titles, exclaiming as she goes,_

_"So no one saw you?"_

_"Of course not!" says the red head flippantly, "We are the masters of-"_

_"Snape nearly caught us," cuts in the black haired boy, more soberly, folding up his invisibility cloak, "But it was worth it, wasn't it?"_

_"I hope so," says the girl fretfully, "I think I'd better go next time…if you two get caught, I mean, look what happened last time…"_

_"But _you're_ head girl," points out the red head, "You can't afford to be caught, either,"_

_"Oh, there's no point arguing now," sighs the girl, in the exasperated voice of one who has argued the same point too many times. She carries a bundle of books over to a table by the fire. The boys follow and plonk themselves down. They each open a book dubiously,_

_"We got what you said," says the dark boy, "But are you sure you can read them?" he stares apprehensively at the tiny, cramped print that fills the pages of his volume, "This doesn't even look like English." The girl glances absently over at him,_

_"They're ancient Atlantean runes," she murmurs, turning back to her own book. The red head gives a snort, _

_"Ancient Atlantean runes?__ You're such a-"_

_"Ron," says the girl in a dignified voice, "Either find a book you can read or go to bed." He looks slightly annoyed, but obeys her anyway. The girl feels a rush of warmth for him, and finds herself admiring the way his vivid hair falls across his forehead. There is a snort from beside her and she finds that the darkhaired boy is smirking slightly. Blood rushes to her cheeks, and she sits a little straighter, her nose in the air,_

_"I'm sure we'll find exactly what we need in these books," she says, trying to sound confident. _

_"It's what Dumbledore would want," says the darkhaired boy firmly. She glances up at him. His green eyes are alight with an almost disturbing fervour. He blinks…_

…and the women is thrown violently back into the present. _All that we did_ she thinks_, all that we went through…all it amounted to was this._ There is no poetry in it. No heroics. All the chances they had had, all the victories they had achieved. They had arrived at the very situation they had been striving to prevent. Never did the warnings of Albus Dumbledore ring more achingly true than on that last day when he had said, not for the first time, that they had won the battle but not the war. And now, really, what had been the use of those endless battles? The fight: a hopeless, tragic battle of good versus evil. The outcome: a boy dead long before his time, a wretched old woman finally done in after a life time on the run, and the shell of man who had once inspired the entire world, now barely aware of his own existence. The woman has lived enough to know that the light can not always be expected to triumph over the darkness, but the part of her that is still that hopeful, anxious, painfully intelligent young girl of twenty years ago, still feels a twinge at the injustice of it. That part of her still does not comprehend how the light could possibly have lost so utterly and completely. How the man before her, once insurmountably brave and seemingly indestructible, could possibly have been broken. The terrible wrongness of the situation is what still causes her heart to bleed. It is what prompts the fearful whisperers outside her cell to gorge on the spirit of their prisoner.

The man lies still, staring into the lined face of the woman. He is falling into her dull brown eyes, and instead of finding forgetfulness, as he did in the eyes of the blond woman, he senses terrible awakening. Categorical evidence to this fact are the salty tears on his cheeks, and the fogging of his glasses which force him to rub them clean for the first time in years. In horror, he sees hope register in the woman's face as she sees him perform this ordinary, everyday action. Hope. Hope is not word that has entered his brain for a long time. It is unnatural…

_"We can't give up hope," says the deep, calm voice of the old man._

_"Ron!" shouts the man's boy-self, "Where are you?" The brown haired girl is screaming, wailing. "He'll be fine," shouts the boy, "Of course he'll be fine!"_

_"You know what you must do," the old man is close by, insistent…_

_"It's cold," says a small, red-haired girl, "Terribly cold…"_

_"We've been through it, you can do it. In fact, you _must_ do it…"_

_"Have faith, my boy, we are nothing if we don't have faith…"_

The man thrashes suddenly, afraid of all the memories that are flooding into his head. _This is not fair_, his mind is screaming, _not again_. But the flow of knowledge cannot be stopped, soon he will know everything, soon it will all begin again. He wants to shout, to use his voice, but senses that this will be the final catalyst. So he controls himself, and silent tears flow freely. His face is pressed against the bars, inches away from the woman's. She is crying again, and their tears mingle in the damp straw…

_"Dumbledore!" he shouts, "Where are you?" he runs into the mist, he slips on a wet patch of ground, stretches a hand out to steady himself, brings it back covered in blood…_

_"This is the beginning of the end," the voice of Cornelius Fudge is low, lifeless. "No!" shouts the man, "There has to be another way!"_

_The mourners sob quietly; a plump woman shrouded in black trembles into the shoulder of a tall man with red hair and spectacles. Five brothers bear a coffin while their sister looks on. The man's boy-self shakes with suppressed rage as he cries…_

The man is clutching the bars of his cage hard, and the cold metal is burning them…

_"Yes, the prophecy. Don't you get it? Either you have to kill him, or he has to kill you!"_

_"I'm going to be a murderer! Don't you see? There's no way out-"_

_"It's _Voldemort! _It's not…it's not _murder!"

_"Then what it is?"_

_The brown haired girl is smiling wearily, _

_"I'll always be your friend, you know." He stares at her, feeling an overwhelming gratitude,_

_"Thanks," he mutters, giving her an awkward hug. He feels happy, "thanks…"_

_"What?" she is upset. There is a hard feeling in his heart,_

_"You heard what I said," he mutters. She looks so hurt..._

_"How could you…how could you even…you _know _me, I would _never…_"_

_"That's what my dad thought…"_

_"You're not comparing me to Peter Pettigrew, are you? Because if you are…" She doesn't know what to say, her face is distraught, yet angry too. Very angry. He is suddenly scared…what was he thinking? What right has he to accuse?_

_"Oh, I didn't mean it! I'm sorry…I'm sorry…I just-"_

_"I'll forgive you today," her tone is business like, "But just…just don't…I don't know. You know I'd never betray you…"_

The man in his cell opens his eyes. It is morning again, and light is filtering in. But this morning is different from all the rest. Today a faint heat is warming the faculties of his brain, making connections. Today, after years of near-oblivion, the man's self has almost been discovered. And there is nothing he can do to stop it. Still clutching the bars, he looks with foggy eyes upon the face of the woman. She stares unblinkingly back, hardly breathing, anticipating the moment when his eyes will clear for good. He lifts a skeletal arm and moves his hand across his face. Then, slowly but surely, his hand, as though it has a life of its own, makes its way through the bars, hovering over the woman's own. Instinctively, he knows that after the initial touch, nothing will ever be the same again. Steeling himself, he gently picks up her hand, and shockingly, she grips it tightly. Fighting the urge to pull away, he takes a shuddering breath, meets her eyes, and _knows_. She does not speak, but acknowledges his realisation with a small nod. He returns her grip on his hand, and then she is smiling. The lines on her face and the heavy bags under her eyes remain, but her whole visage is suddenly youthful. She hasn't smiled in twenty years. It strikes the man as strange, surreal. Why should she smile in the midst of despair, at the brink of this new despair she has forced him to share? Illogically, the man too feels the urge to smile. Perhaps these few moments of happiness are worth the painful, uncertain future? Perhaps. The man takes a deep breath. The next step.

"I - " he croaks, surprised his voice still works after so little use. The woman starts, shocked at this new development, and clings more tightly to his hand. He looks at her. All of his past swirls around in his head. The identity lost in that maelstrom of memory suddenly seems supremely irrelevant. But he wants to acknowledge her. He flounders for the right words. Who is she? A person involved in that weird and wonderful life which is now over. A person who, twenty years ago, he knew. Logically, she could not be that same person now. She is just another being in a wide world he is only just beginning to remember. He must start at the beginning, with the basic facts. Her name? Hardly significant at this point. Her present character? He has no knowledge of it. There is only one thing he can really be sure of.

"I once knew a girl," he says, and he grins.


End file.
